Adolescence, fantasy, desire, and the porous boundary between imagination and damage.

The novel follows a group of teenage boys orbiting one another through humiliation, longing and private mythologies. As ever with Cooper, the surface can look minimal — short scenes, clipped dialogue — but beneath it is a precise examination of power, shame and the way narrative itself becomes a survival tactic.

It’s not shock writing for its own sake. It’s controlled, deliberately uncomfortable fiction about how young men construct identity inside cultural scripts they barely understand.

A late-period Cooper novel that distils his long-standing concerns without softening them.